The Connection Between Check Sheets and Data Analysis

By Shmula Contributor, Last Updated November 21, 2017

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Check sheets are a tool with a lot of unrealized potential, at least in the way they’re being used in various organizations around the world. While many people see them as nothing more than a checklist that lets you verify that a process has been carried out step by step with perfect accuracy, there is a lot more that a proper check sheet can do for you. Mastering their use as early as possible in your leadership can be a great boost to the productivity of the organization, and learning how to use the different types of check sheets correctly can easily transform the whole way you’re doing your work.

Collecting Data for Future Analysis

By far one of the greatest benefits of a good check sheet is that it can allow you to easily collect a lot of data for statistical analysis. There are several types of check sheets that have been specifically designed for this purpose, actually, and knowing the specific application and benefits of each one can be a tremendous boost to your productivity.

For example, if you’re frequently facing specific issues in your processes and you don’t know where they are coming from, you can use one of the several types of defect-related sheets to get an additional insight into that. Check sheets can be very powerful in determining things like the root cause of a problem, its original source, as well as the frequency at which specific problems tend to manifest themselves within your organization.

The defect type sheet can actually be of great use to companies that frequently deal with certain defects, as they can provide you with a direct link between the occurrences of these problems and other surrounding factors. Every little detail will float to the surface, no matter how irrelevant it might have seemed at first.

So for example, if you’re dealing with an issue that only presents itself at a certain time, it might not be too obvious with regular analytical means. But when you’ve stored all test data in a check sheet, you can start going through it to look for links between specific data points. When you use the right statistical analysis tools to work with the data, those connections should become pretty obvious.

Making Sense of Your Data Collection

A big problem in modern statistical analysis in large companies is that a lot of data is being collected without a clear reason for doing so. Businesses end up investing a lot into infrastructure and collection practices for information that they ultimately may not really need. A check sheet can be great for shedding some light onto the way you’re collecting your information, and keeping the main reason for that collection at the forefront.

The very structure of a check sheet makes it pretty clear why the data within it was being collected in the first place, which is of great benefit to organizations that work with lots of data collection systems. Proper statistical analysis requires you to identify where certain data points came from and why you have them in the first place, and check sheets are one of the best tools for making those systems more rigid and structured.

Of course, using a check sheet alone is no guarantee that your data collection will actually be as sensible as you need it to be, and it’s still up to you to ensure that you’re correctly measuring the different variables that play into this. But it goes a lot towards preventing simple mistakes and allowing you to focus more on the actual data collection instead of working on improving your tools themselves.

Conclusion

Check sheets are tool with multiple powerful applications, and they are one of the best tools around when it comes to working with complex data sets and ensuring that you can perform statistical analysis easily and with no issues. They alone are not enough to ensure that you prevent any issues from occurring in your data collection practices, but they can help you make a lot more sense of the data you’re gathering, and its purpose for your current analysis. Once you’ve properly mastered them, the sky is the limit to how useful they can be.

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